SemanticWeb3dot0
From MashupCamp
Here were the main discussion threads of a pretty popular discussion.
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Semantic Web vs semantic web.
Much of the discussion revolved around big "S" vs little "s" semantic web. The little "s" people advocating that the semantic web is already here in a lot of ways given the growing popularity of microformats.
Large 'S' proponents said that the heavy lifting of Semantic Web infrastructure has been largely completed and that tools like sparql will prove to be powerful and easy to use.
What will user's perception of the semantic web be?
It was generally agreed that most users will not really be cognizant of the switch to a semantic web, even if it does occur. There was pretty strong skepticism about the near term existence of 'user agents' or other applications that would be able to trawl the web and buy you "tickets to the city where Bach was born" or other such promises of the semantic web vision.
Topic Maps and RDF
This "format war" of the semantic world is certainly a low profile one. There was very little knowledge of the existence of the competition between RDF (a W3C spec) and TopicMaps (an ISO spec).
There's a very good explanation of how this divide came to be here at ontopia.
Jeff Dwyer presented some of the ideas used at MyHippocampus which runs on a TopicMap framework.
Ontology-pedia
There was also a lot of discussion of ontologies in general. There is currently no 'one-ontology' to rule them all and many took up the position that this is a fool's errand, citing the continually changing nature of human ontologies and the cultural, personal & contextual incompatibilities between existing ontologies (ie those that are in our brain). When a ontology-pedia was proposed to help centralize and keep ontologies current, the discussion turned more to the cultural & contextual issues.
